Thursday, September 9, 2010

So you want to draw a really large dungeon?

Well you may want some really large graph paper to do it with.

There is this at Amazon.com Locally you may try to find a office supply place that sells drafting supplies. Somewhere they will have a rack that hold their large format papers. You want to look for a smaller shop as the big box office stores do not generally stock this stuff.

If you search around you can go up to 27 by 34.

I also recommend looking at Computation Books they are 9.25 by 11.75. The graph paper versions are generally 4 spi. Each page is numbered and there are blank flyleafs you can write on. (like a table of contents) I have one that still good after 25 years that has the majority of my old dungeons in it. It has a heavy cardstock cover which makes it durable.

I have some approximately gigantic graph paper I may start dicking around with. My question is, do you actually use the big map for table purposes.

My thought is that I'd end up scanning or transcribing it into smaller chunks ("one-page dungeon" size?) for keying and table use, in which case I might as well just start that way and cut out the middleman.

This reminds me of my time at a wargames club in the late 70s, early 80s. A fellow showed up with his mega dungeon. I think his maps were 18"x24", 4 or 5 squares. He had worked on this thing while in the Army, and kept all umpteen levels of it rolled up in a plastic mortar tube. We wandered for hours, real time, and were regaled with descriptions of the stonework in the empty passages and empty rooms. We remarked at how, well, empty his dungeon seemed. He explained he had run it for another group elsewhere, who had cleaned out the first two levels, and between now and then, new monsters would not have had time to move in! Thus, the dungeon was almost devoid of life and treasure, except for a few abandoned bags of copper pieces. To this day, we still make sport of the infamous "copper dungeon".

Bat in the Attic Games

How to make a Sandbox

The Old School Renaissance

To me the Old School Renaissance is not about playing a particular set of rules in a particular way, the dungeon crawl. It is about going back to the roots of our hobby and seeing what we could do differently. What avenues were not explored because of the commercial and personal interests of the game designers of the time.

What are RPGs?

A game where the players play individual characters interacting with a setting with their actions adjudicated by a human referee.

Rules are an aide to help the referee adjudicate actions and to help the players interact with the setting.

Dice are used to inject uncertainty which make a tabletop RPG campaign more interesting than "Let's Pretend".

The only thing a player needs to do to roleplay a character is to act if he or she was really there in the setting in that situation.